Looks like I'm going to respond some more. If I'm coherent, which I'm not feeling very (see!), then I'll clear up some things to make sure I balance some of the attitude I emit, as well as maybe clear up some background, and maybe (maybe!) try to bring some of this back to the original post. (though that last is probably secondary to what we're talking about here, in a way.)

Let me go in a random order, forget what I'm trying to say, and leave everything unsaid. I don't deny at all that there are very good people, with whom I have a lot in common, on the other side of this divide from me. I hate that I often come off sounding sort of down on all religious people, because I'm not. I have met some religious people who I've had a shocking (to me) amount of respect for. I don't mean that as in, "Wow, I actually like a religious person?" I mean it as in, "Man, I don't meet people often who I feel this much respect towards."

I grew up Catholic. My mother's strongly religious in a sense; but she's part of the riddle for me, too. I have this problem: I feel like I can't be myself around friends who are religious. It's a serious problem with my mother, because she and I are very, very close. All my life we've talked a LOT, about everything; she's one person I can just talk to for hours on end without running out of words, until my throat hurts. Yet I walk on eggs around my feelings about religion for two primary reasons:

1) (the easier one to understand, I think,) I know she's disappointed in this aspect of me, I don't want to further that.

2) (more complex and weird and key,) I feel like her faith has to be fragile.

Okay, so there's the big thing, and it's weird, and it honestly can't hold water, except it's pretty firmly-held here in my gut. This feeling that the faith of those close to me might shatter in the face of what to me is the obvious logical reaction to religion.

When I say it I honestly have trouble believing myself. More than a self-inflating feeling, though, it comes from this deep root in me that can't understand faith. I don't understand why some people have it and some people don't. I don't really remember a time when i did have it. (Granted another issue for me is that I have a lot of trouble remembering a lot of stuff about my childhood, even though it was average and, well, good.) All I remember is having this exact sense through all of my years learning about religion. I went to Catholic school from third grade on. I attended church every weekend, without fail, until I moved out of my parents' home. But I had this sense all along that everyone just hadn't quite gotten yet to where I was. That surely if any of these people would stop and ask the questions I had they'd come to the same conclusions: there's nothing about THIS particular religion that makes it anymore "true" than any of the other countless religions and mystical whatsits and para-normal belief systems and everything else.

It doesn't feel like an ego trip. It's one of those things where I frustrate the hell out of myself by being unable to get on the other side of the argument.

So how DO we bridge the gap between those of us on my side of the fence and those on the other? The gap itself is what is unexplained. As far as I know the only explanations are biased -- you've either got me, on this side, saying those on the other side of it have a flaw in their logic; or you've got whoever's on the other side, saying... whatever bunches of things they say. (And I've tried to ingest as many of THOSE as I could... from philosophical arguments to scientific creationism books to discussions with acquaintences.) Nothing I've heard has ever explained that GAP, explained what's DIFFERENT about those on either side of it.

It's easy if you just look at extremists, like in all cases. I can argue against a bible-thumper without any thought in my head that they might actually have a point. People who have this UNMOVABLE view of how things are really don't seem to respond at all to the logic of an argument.

But looking at the moderates on either side just points me to that gap, that question that has, to the best of my knowledge, no answer. Is there some fundamental piece of a person that this gap is an expression of? Is faith the expression of a gene?

This gap of course parellels, but isn't the same as, the god question itself. My agnostic mind allows room for the possibility that the gap IS an expression of god's revelation -- god has shown himself to those on one side and not to those on the other. But excepting that, the existence or non-existence of god has no bearing on the gap itself. Whether or not god exists, FAITH that he exists isn't based on logic, it's... just faith.

So have I gone off the edge yet?

So here maybe we come full circle. That gap (yeah, I'll kick me if I say the word one more time, too,) is an unknown factor, completely. So what scares me about mixing faith with policy is that unknown-ness. Is everyone with faith mad? Is everyone without faith mad? Why can't anyone explain it satisfactorily?

Yet there ARE people on the faithful side who do act, to the best of my knowledge, based on a logical world view, not allowing any religious bias to make decisions for them. With those people I feel I can speak the same language. Maybe I'm closer to them than they are to the extremists on that side.

I'll quit now. Thanks for the forum for this.